81-node grid used to break RSA, exploiting an electricity-starved CPU

RSA public-key encryption method is considered a leading mechanism to protect and secure transferred data. For years, it has protected privacy and verified authenticity when using computers, gadgets and web browsers around the globe. In general, 1500 years (using a single processing node) are needed to break the cypher.

Three researchers at the Michigan University claim they can break it simply by tweaking a device’s power supply. The partial lack of electricity power sabotages the encryption process, specifically the random generation mechanism. By using a grid of only 81 Pentium 4 chips and 104 hours of processing time, they were able to successfully break the 1024-bit encryption in OpenSSL on a SPARC-based system.

A day out of the office….

It was a day out of the office and a terrible, stormy weather outside. So unfortunately a planned cycling activity for the group turned out irrelevant and two other activities were chosen instead……. To look at the bright side, one of them was a Texas Hold’em Poker game, and one of the players (Let’s just call him Z) took the whole pot.

In the billiard club we made a short tournament. As unexpected as it may sound, the men lost to the girl… Next time she will learn her lesson. Hopefully…

Are Amazon web services over subscribed ?

Inconsistencies in the performance of Amazon instances processing units and data-access networking interfaces are raising the question in subject.

Irregularities were always present in EC2 performance. Back in 2008 it was Ted Dziuba that claimed Amazon instances’ CPU hardly cross the 50% capacity level and  wondered “How they can get away with this?”.

Well.. That was almost two years ago ! Question is –  How are things today ?

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Alan Williamson says nothing has changed. Actually, a series of simple experiments he performed raise serious questions. For example: The response time of an instance to a simple ping packet jumped to above 7 seconds (!) without any change in instance activity.

Alan is familiar with this symptom ; He claims it is exactly what happened when Flexiscale suffered under load.

Oversubscribed or not, customers pay way over they should when they use Amazon’s EC2 services.

It is demonstrated again that “pay-per-machine-time” is good for.. Amazon. Not the customers.

A new post about GreenCloud Ltd.!

Read the fresh post about GreenCloud Ltd.,  taken from startupmania.co.il, a leading startup & technology Israeli blog:

A link to the post

The post represents GreenCloud Ltd. as a promising startup company, having an innovating solutions to cloud processing challenges in the industry.

Awareness for local grid computing costs grows significantly

Several days ago a school employee has resigned from his position, after his installation of SETI@Home on school network computers had been revealed.

Total costs of computing power and other implications on the local network are estimated 1-million$, according to the superintendent reviewing the case.

This is just one example for the rapid growing of awareness for combined costs of grid computing power, even in non-commercial organizations.

As no such relevant feature is offered today in the industry, future grid platforms must include an integrated energy consumption policy so that costs can be monitored, and expense-related implications can become more transparent.

It is also clear that growing awareness for costs of local grid consumption power will require state of the art platforms to benefit the user somehow, and provide significant added values, so that the growing worries of the potential users will be addressed.

Amazon servers host malicious software

The cyber criminals behind the Zeus Botnet, a software having an impressive fraud record, hosted their central server on Amazon’s EC2 Platform, as SecurityFocus reports.

As experts claim fraud money linked to Zeus creators estimated 100 million dollars (the numbers refer to 2009 alone), it is clear how cloud technology helps hiding from authorities.

As no network activity filtering mechanism is provided by Amazon, processing activities may spread viruses and malicious software, intentionally or not.

Methusela Cebrian Ferrer, senior researcher at CA, concluded in his blog post:

“The group behind this criminal activity is obviously doing it for financial gain –  stealing both your identity and your money,” Ferrer stated. “In this variant, we have learned how cloud on-demand — pay-as-you-use — offerings could be used to fuel such online cybercrimes.”

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